We continued through college, mailing letters to each other and completely covering the envelopes with drawings. We were obsessed with making tightly filled-in abstract designs with markers. When I was in middle school, I had a friend who would draw with me. Lucy Mink Covello, “Makeup” (2015), oil on linen over panel, 16 x 20 inches I would measure everything to see if the rearrangement would work. I would move my furniture, perhaps to expend excess energy, but before moving it, I would make a drawing of my room on graph paper. I liked to draw the kitchen window, or sit outside and draw. I did not take art classes, but I drew from an early age. I walked alone to school by the same houses for years, which was more time for daydreaming.Įven if they were scary, I would get lost in my children’s book illustrations - in the line quality, the details. The school day was one long daydreaming session, except lunch, gym, art, and geometry. I stayed up late watching anything I could. I can remember a lot of small details from my childhood, like visuals from television, and the families who were characters. Lucy Mink Covello: I grew up in Oakland, New Jersey. Jennifer Samet: What experiences did you have with art as a child? In the summer of 2015 she was the subject of a solo exhibition organized by Jason Andrew at Outlet Fine Art, Brooklyn, New York, and included in a group exhibition at David Findlay Jr. Her work has been shown regularly at Geoffrey Young Gallery, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and in 2014 she had a solo exhibition at Giampietro Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut. Although her paintings each carry an overarching mood, they feel like an abstract translation of moving through environments, where a host of associations, memories and daily obligations are ever-present.Ĭovello was born in 1968 in Oakland, New Jersey, and received her BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design, and her MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. The juxtapositions and color chords are strange, evocative, and sometimes jarring. The forms are vying for space, but also integrated - like family in the midst of a creative working life. Lucy Mink Covello (photo by the author for Hyperallergic) (click to enlarge)Ĭovello’s paintings are compact abstractions, in which distinct forms, patterns, and shapes press urgently into each other.
I began to understand how parenthood and her children’s experience of the world are so central to Covello’s painting. My first impulse was to edit it out how could children be relevant to serious art discourse?īut, a couple of weeks ago, when Covello and I met in New York, she shared her interpretation of the Dana Schutz painting, “ Slow Motion Shower” (2015) - that it was about the demands and interruptions a new mother faces while trying to take a shower.
I noticed that the conversation leaned heavily into discussions of family and motherhood, and I wondered whether it was influenced by the situation. Our interview was punctuated by the buzzing of insects, animals, and children. We met at my friends’ farm, spread a blanket under trees in the apple orchard, and shared some beer, bread, and cheese. Lucy Mink Covello lives in New Hampshire, not too far from where I spend a couple of weeks every summer.
Lucy Mink Covello, “I needed a place to put some things that we weren’t allowed to talk about” (2010), oil on linen over panel, 19 x 20.5 inches (all images courtesy the artist)
0 kommentar(er)
